What an honor to have my stories read with such closeness and depth! Read the full review here.
 I'm happy to share my ninth published excerpt from my novel, People We Trust, which appears in the latest issue of Action, Spectacle. Reading the excerpt (or any of the nine excerpts already published in literary journals) will show you that this is a novel about the traumas inflicted by the Marcos dictatorship on ordinary people, and how these traumas continued to linger, unaddressed, in Philippine society until the next authoritarian came along. Many thanks to Adam Day for selecting this excerpt for publication! I am honored to share this space with Brandon Taylor, Octavio Quintanilla, and other writers and artists I admire. Read my excerpt here and the rest of the issue here.
 To coincide with the publication of my essay, "My Father and W.B. Yeats", in the summer 2022 print issue of The Hopkins Review, a selection of my father's poems in English have been presented as an online feature on THR's website. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dora Malech, EIC of The Hopkins Review, for generously soliciting these poems, and for thoughtfully timing this feature on my father's birthday. It's one of the best gifts he has ever received. Read his selection of poetry here.
 For Literary Hub, I wrote a short essay about my own sadness over publishing my first book five years after my father's sudden passing. Included in this essay is an unpublished poem he wrote for me when I was a baby, in which he confronts his own mortality while contemplating my sleeping form. I feel like it's an essay we wrote together, which the title of this essay as it appears on Lit Hub somewhat belies. Read the essay here.
"A Shared Stillness" (ColoRado Review, Spring 2021) Named Notable In the Best American Essays 202210/24/2022  I am honored to share that my essay about learning to tango in Aotearoa New Zealand, and drawing strength and joy from my tango dancing grandparents in the process, was named Notable in the Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. It's my second time to have a notable mention in the Best American Essays after my first mention in 2016, and I'm pleased to see how this anthology continues to support excellence in nonfiction writing with its notable list. I'd like to thank Colorado Review for publishing my essay in its Spring 2021 issue, and for continuing to support my work. You can find the full list here, and my essay here.
 My debut collection of stories goes on sale today in the US and internationally, and to help mark this special occasion, Electric Literature graciously invited me to create a reading list of my choosing. It being Filipino-American History Month and all, I decided to create a list of novels, story collections, and memoirs which like mine, confront the difficulties and discomforts of Filipino family bonds. This may be comforting or triggering to the Filipinos who go over this list, depending on who you ask, but in any case I had a lot of fun making this list! Read it here.
 My favorite interview about my book so far was made possible thanks to Greg Marshall, my Michener Center buddy and author of Leg, forthcoming from Abrams books in 2023. I felt like I was reliving my MFA years with Greg while we corresponded over email about writing my very Filipino book, and also about tango, cooking, inhabiting different languages and cultures in my work, and being influenced by E.M. Forster. It was a joyous conversation and you'll be missing out on so much if you don't read it. Much gratitude to The Hopkins Review for generously publishing it on their website! Read the full interview here.
 The first review of my debut story collection, Love and Other Rituals, appears in The Pantograph Punch, an arts and culture magazine publishing out of Aotearoa New Zealand. As a former contributor to The Pantograph Punch (see my essay about Katherine Mansfield from 2020), I am grateful for its continuing endorsement of my work. Below is an excerpt from Frances Revita's lovely engagement:
"If home is where the heart is, then I would like to cut my heart into tiny pieces and disperse them across all the spaces I call home. This is obviously an impractical and fatal solution. In Macansantos’ stories, however, home is a multisensory experience, memories that elicit an aching feeling. A feeling affectionately found in the unwarranted comment of 'You’ve gained weight!' as a greeting, the rekindling of old friendships in a foreign land, and the jumbled scents of 'steamed corn, roasted peanuts, car exhaust and newly washed hair'." Read the review here and the rest of the issue where it appears, entitled Aroha (meaning "love" in Te Reo Maori), here.   An essay that is of particular importance to me, about how I grounded myself in the magic of this world after my father's sudden passing by returning to his poetry, and reexamining his affinities with William Butler Yeats (particularly their shared fascination with the occult), is in the summer 2022 issue of The Hopkins Review. This essay was published under very interesting and unusual circumstances, and all I can afford to say at the moment is that I'm deeply touched by how Dora Malech, EIC of THR, found the piece while it was doing the submission rounds, connecting with it in the most beautiful way possible. Purchase their latest issue here and read it on Project MUSE.
 I will be joining a group of wonderful women writers, who like me are currently writers in residence at the Storyknife Writers Retreat, to read from our work! It will be via zoom on September 20, 2022, 6 pm, Alaska Daylight Time, and is free and open to the public. More info about that here. Hoping to see you there!
Note: If you missed our event, you can watch the recording here. |
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